The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Religion
The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895
Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Evolution
But another factor has to be considered. If we double each dimension
of our amoeba, we shall increase its surface four times, its mass
eight-fold. Now the power of absorbing oxygen and excreting waste is
evidently proportional to the excretory and respiratory surface, and
much the same is true of digestion. But the amount of oxygen
required, and of waste to be removed is proportional to the mass;
for every particle of protoplasm requires food and oxygen, and
produces waste. The particles of protoplasm in our new, larger
amoeba can therefore receive only half as much oxygen as before,
and rid themselves of their waste only half as fast. There is
danger of what in our bodies would be called suffocation and
blood-poisoning. The amoeba having attained a certain size meets
this emergency by dividing into two small individuals, the division
is a physical adaptation. But the many-celled animal cannot do this;
it must keep its cells together. It gains the additional surface by
folding and plaiting. And the complicated internal structure of
higher animals is in its last analysis such a folding and plaiting
in order to maintain the proper ratio between the exposed surface of
the cells and their mass. And each cell in our bodies lives in one
sense its own individual life, only bathed in the lymph and
receiving from it its food and oxygen instead of taking it from the
water.
But in another sense the cells of our body live an entirely
different life, for they form a community. Division of labor has
taken place between them, they are interdependent, correlated with
one another, subject therefore to the laws of the whole community or
organism. There are many respects in which it is impossible to
compare Robinson Crusoe with a workman in a huge watch factory; yet
they are both men.
Both the amoeba and we live in the closest relation to our
environment, and conformity to it is evidently necessary: life has
been defined as the adjustment of internal relations to external
conditions. We continually take food, use it for energy and growth,
and return the simpler waste compounds. We are all of us, as
Professor Huxley has said, "whirlpools on the surface of Nature;"
when the whirl of exchange of particles ceases we die. We have seen
that the fusion of two amoebæ results in a new rejuvenated
individual. Why is a mixture of two protoplasms better than one? We
can frame hypotheses; we know nothing about it. What of the mind of
the amoeba? A host of questions throng upon us and we can answer
no one of them. All the great questions concerning life confront us
here in the lowest term of the animal series, and appear as
insoluble as in the highest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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